Analysis Shows Gun Websites of All Kinds Get Far, Far More Traffic Than Gun Control Websites

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I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, if you want to know how the public feels about something, do it in the way a marketer would do it, not in the same way a politician would.

Polls work great for talking points on the campaign trail. However, if we really want to know what America thinks about a topic, all we have to do is look at the internet data.

This week we wanted to look at the hard traffic. Alexa is a web service which allows people to see how popular a website is in comparison to other websites. So, if a website has a global Alexa ranking of 99,000, we can say that it is one of the top 100,000 websites on the web based on Alexa’s traffic calculation algorithm (which is considered an Internet marketing standard). So, in simpler terms, the smaller the number, the better. Alexa also hands out rankings for the US market to see how popular websites are within the country.

Now, Alexa is only an estimate of traffic and is certainly not a 100% accurate tracking mechanism, but I do think it can give us some general trend information, which is what we’re looking for here.

This week we wanted to look at the Alexa rankings of 30 websites including the websites of the five the more well known anti-gun groups out there, Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, The Brady Campaign, The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and the National Gun Victims Action Council.

I also included 25 pro-gun websites which includes a mixture of retail websites, news blogs, gear blogs, forums, and pro-gun political groups.

What I found was pretty shocking. Except for Everytown for Gun Safety, every other anti-gun website was far, far below the pro-gun websites. I think I could have easily found 100+ more gun websites that would have outranked the other four anti-gun websites.

We also put an asterisk by the Everytown website for a few reasons. 1) It was only launched a couple of months ago, so the data is very, very limited. 2) The website was launched with a $50 million backing, nowhere remotely near the funding any of the other websites gets (except for the NRA sites). 3) The domain name was the subject of an ownership dispute when the site was launched, resulting in additional news stories about the website being created. This likely drove inflated traffic to the website.

Here is the spreadsheet of the results (sorted by Alexa US Ranking):

As you can see there are pro-gun sites in multiple functions (retail, blogs, political) beating out the anti-gun groups. Combine this data with our search data analysis from last week and I think we have a pretty clear picture of what the Internet using public in the United States is interested in.